Arbor Day

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 29, 16 July 1903, Page 1

Arbor Day

Wednesday of this week was Arbor Day. It was a Government holiday, and here and there small groups of teachers and taught set rooted saplings, with much ado, into holes in the ground and left them to their fate — played at tree-planting in the dainty and dilettante style of the ' pretty maid ' of the tableau who ' goes a-m.ilk-ing ' in ball-room shoes, with a 1 gilded three-legged stool under one arm and a pasteboard bucket under the other. Little knots of prisoners, their clothes, decorated with the broad-arrow, plant small areas year by year about such show-spots as Rotorua. And for the rest axe and fire-stick and whirling saw are eating our forests up. Our timber export is increasing by some £60,000 a year; the fast-increasing demand in England, America, etc., for wood-pulp for paper-making is tolerably sure, in the near future, to hasten the devouring of our forests ; and thus, while we are planting by the rood, we are destroying by the square mile, reducing year by year the value of a great source of national revenue, denuding the hillsides of their natural protective covering, and preparing the way for floods, landslips, the detrition of many of our rich uplands and the destruction of the arable country at their bases. A few years ago, in writing on this subject, we instanced the warning lesson of what we had personally witnessed in Spain and in Franco, where the Governments are now engaged, at an enormous expense, in re-afforesting great denunded areas of once valuable farm lands, which, as a result of the reckless destruction of timber in a former generation, have been turned into a stony, silt-strewn wilderness by the unbroken action of rushing flood-waters. We have in our forests one of the best of our national assets. But they are being mismanaged in a way that inevitably lead to a grave national loss We sorely need 'a live and active Forest Department, with a system of planting and cut-ting-out by rotation-blocks which has been such a boon to Germany, Norway, and Sweden, Switzerland, and India. With such a system we should speedily see the aimless and unskilled destruction of our forests cease and ' Fresh groves grow up and their green branches shcot Towards the old and still-enduring skies.'